Today, convenience and automation are two of the ways that a company can differentiate itself. They provide easier ways for their customers to interact with them and ways for those customers to be handled in a more automated way. The company is then able to re-deploy service representatives into other roles that might be more productive to its goals.
A way that customers have used automation is in paying bills, through mechanisms such as web-enabled bill-pay and e-bills. A customer is able to spend minutes, rather than hours, managing the bills they get every month. This decreases possibilities for losing a paper copy of the bill. Without e-bills, the customer needs to contact the company, get a new paper bill issued and then pay that bill. This could take time and, in some cases, results in the customer being charged a late fee. In some cases, failure to pay one bill on time may even result in a loss of insurance coverage, or an imposition of accelerated mortgage pay-off penalties.